Political ads: Do we know enough?

For all Americans who bemoan political advertisements and the information about them, former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith has a message: Calm down already.

“People really need to relax and say, ‘Do we have enough to judge the ads?’ I think almost always we do,” said Smith, an election law lawyer who serves as chairman of the pro free speech, anti-campaign regulation organization Center for Competitive Politics.

Story Continued Below

“There’s a growing body of evidence that the main reason some people want more disclosure is not so they can judge the ads themselves and judge the credibility of the ads, but precisely the opposite,” Smith said during an interview for POLITICO’s weeklong video series on money and politics, which launched Tuesday. “They’ve already judged the ads. They’ve decided they don’t like the speaker, and what they want to do is harass and boycott and bother the speaker. And I don’t think there’s any reason why the government should be operating a system of mandatory disclosure for the purpose of helping people molest and bother and vandalize and boycott their fellow citizens for their political conversations.”

Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in January 2010, much ado has been made about the notion of corporate personhood, and whether a lack of federal regulations is effectively granting corporations similar rights to those of an individual.

“Of course, corporations are not people, but they are made up of people, and it’s a very convenient legal fiction to treat them as people. Basically, corporations have all the rights that their members have when they associate in a group,” Smith said. “So, for example, we as people, we have a right to speak. I have a right to speak. You have a right to speak. If we get together, we have a right to speak, and we have a right to speak as we get together as a corporation to speak. We have a right to petition to assemble.”

Notably this year, comedian Stephen Colbert has lampooned the nation’s campaign disclosure system by playing on a series of federal court decisions that have made it easier for corporations, unions and special interests to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political communications.

He’s even created his own super PAC and a nonprofit corporation designed to engage in political messaging.